I'm not so sure. It makes some sense: Here is a service we are happy to provide, in a sense a form of insurance. The point of it is that the community pitches i

I'm not so sure. It makes some sense: Here is a service we are happy to provide, in a sense a form of insurance. The point of it is that the community pitches in, to cover the catastrophic case that we hope no one has. If you decide not to pay into such a cooperative scheme, you're abusing the trust of all of your neighbors if you expect them to save your home anyway. This is part of the reason we often use taxes to cover the cost of things like this. On the other hand, in this case they had already deployed, and it would have been nicer if there had been SOME price that they had thought of as the "fee" for service to non-subscribers. 5k, 10k, etc: better than losing the house. Once you advertise something like that, though, people will stop subscribing, and decide to gamble that they won't have a catastrophe. The price has to either be high enough to discourage that, or high enough that the fire department can cover its operating costs by servicing X fires per year.